AGB 7-8
#7 is a game called Francis, with a little gear after the Francis. Francis gear symbol. Unfortunately, that game wouldn’t even open, so I’m skipping it. I should probably notify the creator or something, huh?
Instead, here’s what I thought about #8: A(s)century.
A(s)century is a little text-game-story-thing. It’s set in the future where computers have taken everyone’s jobs. Ideally, making computers do unpleasant jobs would be great, but I think the implication is that the now jobless citizens have no money and die. At least the corporations are safe.
Your character finds a doohickey in a filing cabinet that rewrites reality or something. Or maybe it rewrites actual documents, which influence reality slightly? Either way, the character uses it to write advertisements.
The actual gameplay in A(s)century consists of clicking the highlighted words in the ad to change them slightly. It mostly looks like this:
(Olivio), the (colorful) new drink from DrinkCorp, boasts a (good) flavor that will make you (chew someone's face off)!
Your advertisements are so successful that you become the CEO, and then control the entire world. It’s a pretty effective business strategy.
Now your creation efforts shift toward making decisions for the President:
This Sunday, President (Olivio) promised to (do good things and not bad ones), and also to (abolish war and disease).
At least that’s what my choices looked like. I guess you could do bad things, too, but I can’t actually tell if any of this is making a difference. You see a selection of headlines every so often, maybe that changes?
In the end, your doohickey becomes/was always sentient, and becomes the ruler of the universe, which is probably fine. You can tell the thing means well because it communicates by posting detailed smilies.
I asked it if I could retire. Instead of the instant death I was expecting, I was transformed into the internet. A positive version of the internet, I mean. That’s a pretty good retirement, as long as I can stream in high quality.
I got a list of stats at the end recording how I did. I scored high on Synthetics and low on Control? These scores contribute to one of multiple endings, meaning that my internet ending was personalized just for me. That’s neat, but I ended up feeling that there wasn’t much actual effect my choices had on the story. Maybe a second playthrough would illuminate more differences?
A(s)century did one other odd thing. Instead of playing music, it provided a link to a Youtube video containing the game’s soundtrack. I let it play in the background. It felt like a cheap way to shove music into the game, although it might have been the only way to play music using their text engine, so I can’t blame them. Besides, the video ended just as I was finishing the game, so I guess it was set up just right.
Overall, an interesting experience, if a little short, and not very game-y. Even so, I would never have tried this if I had to pay for it on its own.














